to what PC? The internment of the Japanese during WWII? the recent headlines about the failure of the FBI to follow up on specific tips/warnings about specific actions of specific people (vs. gee, let’s closely examine all ‘middle eastern looking men from 20 - 40’).
and, while we’re calling for cites, other than the OP’s op ed pieces (naturally) we don’t have specifics as what each of these people said, and how it may be different, let alone hypocritical (clue #1, it’s neither hypocritical nor a conflict to say:
1 that the FBI etc should follow up on specific warnings, clues etc for specific people,
2. that FBI etc should follow up on specific odd behavior from non specific persons. and
3. that pulling over and closely examining all people fitting a certain description of physical characteristics is likely to be non productive (Ossma doesn’t fit that profile for example, plus there are female bombers); and likely to piss off potential allies (ie other folks of that region who aren’t part of the terrorist network, but who may actually get tired of being detained frequently).
Well, some middle-level bureaucrats in the FBI (and a lot of profile-championing pundits) are now claiming in a clear case of CYA that they might have thrown out the Phoenix Report for fear of charges of profiling. For the last week, every statement from the FBI has said that the reason was a lack of manpower and an evaluation that the possibility of the Phoenix Memo scenario was remote. Now some guy comes out of the woodwork to anonymously claim that they feared accusations of profiling and the profiling advocates cheer him on.
Ri-i-i-i-i-ght!
Nobody gets to see what the FBI is doing in their investigations unless the FBI announces their actions. Even now we don’t have the citations for the upper level decisions. No one would have known of any suspected profiling if the anonymous agent(s) had not thrown that red herring across the trail.
The charges of profiling from the press and concerned groups have always been in response to some lame public comment from someone in the administration or some published directive for future actions. Where have you ever seen the FBI publish their next step in an investigation?
If the FBI did quash the investigation for a fear of accusations of profiling, then they were doubly stupid: they feared being exposed for an activity that no one could see and which was not based on profiling.
Fortune Magazine: Phoenix Memo indicates the men were being investigated because they were known members of or associates of members of specific terrorist organizations–not that they were randomly picked by the FBI because they were Miseastern.
Once it had been established that specific Mideast-terrorist-linked individuals were taking flight training, it would not have been profiling to scan the rolls of other flight schools for Mideastern students, then check out those students. That is the difference between investigation or analysis and profiling. Profiling would have been to sweep all the flight schools–and all the schools where the chemistry/explosives or biological weaponry or nuclear power etc. was studied–hauling every Mideastern student out for a grilling. A waste of time and effort based on nothing but ethnic profiling. With an actual list of names and connections, however, the rules are different.
Opposition to profiling does not mean that evidence must be ignored if it happens to point to a group–it means that there must be evidence to begin with. Stopping every Mideastern-appearing individual at every airline gate for harrassment while allowing the rest of the passengers to carry their weapons aboard as they always have is ethnic profiling. It is useless as a defense. Examining every passenger carefully for contraband and then using behavior profiling to look for people to check even more thoroughly is not the same thing at all.
BTW, I call Bullshit on this piece of self-serving nonsense:
I won’t pretend to know what the “Yugo community” (whatever that is–those drivers still stuck with cheap cars?) would do, but I know for a fact that
you do not know either
and that
you don’t have the Arab immigrant experience to compare against.
There is no significant Yugoslavian community in Detroit. Even if you could get the Serbs, Slovenians, and Croatians to come together for anything other than soccer matches, those groups are so much smaller than the Polish and Italian and black–and Arab–communities in Southeast Michigan that they have never suffered the sort of group discrimination that leads a group to see itself as victims. The various Yugoslavian ethnic groups in Detroit can more nearly be compared to the Belgians living near Grosse Point Park or the Maltese on the near West side: interesting ethnic groups that put on nice festivals who have never really suffered discrimination in Detroit.
The Arabs in the Detroit region, particularly in Dearborn, but also in other communities, have been the victims of government-led discrimination for well over 20 years. Nothing in the “Yugoslav” experience in Detroit compares to the Arab experience in Dearborn where the mayor and council have attempted to use shopping malls that no one intended to build, expansions of the Ford complex that Ford was not contemplating, and the utterly bogus claim of “run down” neighborhoods to try to raze the Arab community on the east side of town since the late 1970s. (I do not know that the citizens of Dearborn actually support these government initiatives, but they certainly elected several governments that enjoyed proposing the elimination of the Arab community.)
Anti-Arab activities have been sporadic but increasing ever since the first OPEC price hikes. The only antagonism toward “Yugoslavs” is found among cousins of the people who spent the 1990s in a bitter civil war back in Europe.
Had you lived in Cleveland, you could at least claim that the various ethnic groups associated with Yugoslavia have suffered discrimination. On the other hand, they have been a political force for so long, here, that you would probably have to go back to 1927 or 1922 to actually find examples.
Anyone who doesn’t think young, Muslim males of Middle Eastern descent should receive a bit more scrutiny than elderly Norwegian women at American airports, given what the U.S. knows about the enemies who are trying to tear the country down, needs a reality-check.
However, it can become dangerous to focus all scrutiny on young, Muslim males of Middle Eastern descent.
Let us recall an incident from 1983. A sophisticated suitcase bomb was checked aboard an Israeli airliner bound for London. The bomb was to go off in mid-flight, causing the jet to crash. But it failed to explode.
The “terrorist” who brought the suitcase on board was a white, British woman.
And in 1986, a very similar plot was thwarted, when an Irish woman was stopped in Heathrow Airport with plastic explosives in her luggage, before she embarked on an El Al flight to Israel. She was the girlfriend of a Syrian radical (and pregnant with his baby), and did not know he had set her up to die in order to blow up the plane.
Al Qaeda has already proven that its clever and resourceful. While it makes sense to give Arabs extra scrutiny, let’s not get lax about everybody else, either.
Normally, Kristof’s heart’s in the right place and I agree with his opinions. This time, his heart’s still in the right place, but I disagree with him. But the opinion column you just quoted contrasts severely in its general tone and lack of racial paranoia with the one in the OP, and if you can’t distinguish the difference, I’m very sorry for you.
Yes, indeed, the tone is very, very different. I’d say Coulter’s column was more viciously anti-Democrat than anti-Arab. Either way, like most of her columns, it is a nasty piece of work.
However, it’s noteworthy that even though these two columnists are so different in so many ways, their columns agreed on a number of substantive points.
wring, Kristof himself addresses that point in the article–that Moussaoui’s behavior probably would not have been seen as suspicious had he not looked like he does:
Do pilot schools routinely encounter students who are “wretched” yet insist on learning to fly the largest commercial plane in the U.S. while showing “unusual interest” in the plane’s in-flight security? Do we have a statement from the guy who turned him in along the lines of “I jest knew I couldn’ trust them sneaky AY-rabs?”
Moussaoui’s ethnicity certainly played a part in his apprehension, but he wasn’t turned in for being Mideastern–he still had to exhibit other behavior to garner attention.
I’m sure I don’t know, tom. I don’t think there’s any way, short of asking, that we could know just exactly what kinds of pilots and pilot trainees are considered suspicious and perhaps reported to authorities.
And I think the question Kristof appears to be addressing isn’t, “Would he have been reported just for being Middle Eastern, absent any other behavior?” but rather, “Would a ‘white’ person exhibiting similar behavior have been reported to the FBI?”
Without some way of knowing just exactly what kind of people do get reported by flights schools to the FBI, we won’t know the answer to that question. And it’s an important question–if the answer turns out to be “no,” what implications does that have?